Post by jannikki on Feb 21, 2007 19:05:23 GMT -4
The Machiavellian case for public financing of elections.
By Zachary Roth
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Early this summer, in one of the periodic manifestations of the herd mentality for which this city’s pundit class is known, official Washington decided that corruption didn’t matter. The main piece of evidence for this conclusion was the special election in June to replace Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the California Republican congressman who months earlier had been convicted of bribery. The Democratic candidate had made issues of ethics and influence the focus of her campaign—and wound up losing to a former GOP lobbyist. “The culture of corruption isn’t selling,” declared Slate’s John Dickerson the following day, referring to the Democrats’ label for the Republican scandals of the previous year. Democrats largely accepted the new conventional wisdom, deciding merely to check the box on corruption, rather than making it a focus of their pitch to voters. As the campaign wore on, they invoked the “culture of corruption” less and less frequently. Several Democratic strategists told me before the election that they just didn’t think people cared that much about the issue.
As it turned out, both the pundits and the party were wrong. In official exit polling, more voters named corruption as an extremely important issue than any other, including Iraq. Since then, some pollsters have challenged the way the question was asked on the survey, and expressed doubts that concerns about corruption really did outweigh those about the war. But no experts deny that the issue played a much more crucial part in the Democratic win than almost anyone had expected.
Without really asking for it, then, Democrats have been given a mandate by voters to clean up Washington. Rather than running with it, however, the party is poised once again to check the box on corruption. Democratic leaders have announced that, in their first 100 hours in office, they’ll introduce an ethics- and lobbying-reform package that would ban lobbyist-financed gifts, meals, and travel; mandate disclosure of all member contacts with lobbyists; and address the problem of earmarks by requiring that the sponsors of funding for home-state pet projects be identified, among other steps. These measures are a clear improvement on the toothless approach embraced by congressional Republicans in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal last year. But few seriously believe that they get to the heart of Washington’s influence problem. That problem will exist as long as elected officials must raise large amounts of money to run for office from the organized economic interests they’re supposed to be regulating. That’s why any serious effort to clean up Washington must break the connection between money and elections.
The only way to do that is to provide candidates for office with public revenue to run their campaigns. Such a system of public financing has been the brass ring for reformers for three decades. Versions of public financing have been passed in both Arizona and Maine, where candidates for legislative and statewide offices can receive campaign dollars from the state treasury (see “How Public Financing Works,” page 38). Having been beta-tested, and shown to work effectively, over half a decade at the state level—and now that the issue of money in politics is at the height of its public awareness thanks to the sins of the Republican Congress—this is the perfect time to take the system nationwide.
But despite the efforts of some committed reformers in Congress, neither chamber’s Democratic leadership appears likely to put the issue squarely on the agenda during this session. The office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told me that, though she herself supports public financing, she has not yet decided to make it a “caucus position”—and she has conspicuously failed to sign a public-financing pledge being circulated by good-government groups. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been no more enthusiastic.
This is a crazy decision. Leave aside the fact that, without public financing, you can’t begin to reform Washington’s pay-to-play legislative system. Leave aside the fact that major progressive policy goals—from universal health care to a fairer tax code—probably can’t be achieved without public financing. Leave aside, even, the fact that the current system, which winds up giving outsized political influence to those who can afford to fund campaigns, is a grievous affront to the ideals of the founding fathers. Focus instead on what is, to elected officials, the most important consideration of all: crass political advantage.
By failing to unite behind public financing, Democrats may be blowing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to, as President Bush is wont to say, “change the game” of American politics in their favor. It’s no accident that the rise of conservative power in Washington that began in 1980 and accelerated after 1994 coincided with an exponential increase in the cost of political campaigns. Any system that uses corporate dollars to fund candidates’ bids for office will, almost by definition, advantage the party that hews closest to corporate interests. Over the last 12 years, Republicans have figured out how to exploit that dynamic to build a political machine with which they have dominated their opponents. Now that Democrats are back in power, they have a choice: They can try to adapt to that system by going all out to get their share of the spoils. Or they can destroy it altogether by cutting off the money on which it depends.
Partisans for public financing
Today, many in Washington see public financing as the province of earnest good-government types—the kind of people who live in older northeastern suburbs, and lobby their town council for safer swing-sets. But the issue’s first modern-era champion could hardly have been further from that image. Sen. Russell Long—the son of Huey P. Long, the legendary Louisiana governor who built a machine that dominated state politics in the 1920s and ’30s—was a hard drinker, wily political operator, and close ally of LBJ, who understood how public financing could be used as a political tool. In 1966, concerned about the Republicans’ growing ability to out-raise his party, Long proposed a system that would have provided federal funds for presidential and congressional candidates who agreed to spending limits. His bill passed, but Congress voted the following year to make it inoperative pending further review—thanks in large part to the fears of Sen. Robert Kennedy and his supporters that it would reduce the advantage of candidates with large amounts of private money. A year later, Sen. Kennedy used much of his family’s private fortune to challenge LBJ for the Democratic nomination.
The issue reasserted itself after the Watergate scandal—in which the Nixon White House used anonymous campaign contributions to fund a slew of political dirty tricks, including the break-in at the Watergate building itself. In 1977, majorities in both houses of the Democratic Congress supported a new public-financing proposal, but Senate Republicans filibustered the bill. That set a pattern. Over the ensuing 17 years, various legislative efforts on public financing attracted majority support, only to be filibustered to death by Senate Republicans.
The GOP has consistently opposed public financing over the years, in part out of a stated ideological aversion to all but the most essential forms of non-defense-related public spending. But there’s little doubt that much of the Republican opposition derives from the accurate assessment that the existing private system favors them. In 1988, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—today the Senate GOP leader and the standard bearer for the party’s opposition to all forms of campaign-finance reform—admitted as much: “What this is all about is a struggle for partisan advantage,” he told Jim Lehrer. Democrats, McConnell said, “don’t do as well with…contributors as we do.”
Finally, in 1992, thanks in part to the efforts of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Democrats overcame the filibuster, only to see President George H.W. Bush veto the bill. Movement conservatives always hated the elder Bush, but without this veto, which preserved the private system, they almost certainly could not have come to dominate the political landscape over the next 15 years as completely as they did.
In truth, though, by the early 1990s, many Democrats had grown less enthusiastic about public financing. Over the preceding decade, Rep. Tony Coelho, in his role as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had led an effort to increase the amount of corporate money the party raised. Coelho’s success convinced Democratic House leaders Tom Foley and Dick Gephardt that the system of private financing could be made to work for their party. Many reformers believed that Foley and Gephardt only allowed the 1992 bill to pass because they were confident that it would be vetoed.
Indeed, the following year—with a Democrat in the White House who had pledged his support for reform—Foley did not let public financing out of the House. President Clinton, sensing a tough inter-party battle, chose to spend his limited political capital elsewhere. That proved a crucial turning point: With the system of private financing now unchallenged, Republicans—after taking Congress in 1994—had free rein to build the political machine they would use to dominate Democrats over the next decade.
That machine works as follows: First, Republican leaders pressure major K-Street lobbying shops to hire loyal GOP lieutenants—usually former congressional aides—in place of the pragmatic corporate executives who used to be in charge. That allows the party to subsume K Street’s vast resources—its lawyers, lobbyists, PR professionals, and, most important, its money—into the Republican political operation. Through their allies on K Street, GOP leaders can ensure that lobbying firms give the lion’s share of their donations to Republicans—helping to perpetuate the party’s political dominance. The numbers speak for themselves. In 1993, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, 19 key industries—including accounting, pharmaceuticals, and defense—gave roughly evenly between the parties. By 2003, they gave twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats.
A closer look at the numbers makes the GOP’s money advantage—particularly after 2000 when it had also captured the White House—even clearer. In the 2002 cycle, Republicans out-raised Democrats by over one third, according to figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, and which include contributions to individual candidates, to the parties themselves, and to their various committees. In 2004, Republicans out-raised Democrats by almost one quarter. And in 2006, when Democrats appeared likely to retake Congress, Republicans still had an advantage of almost 14 percent. In other words, even in a year when Democrats were favored, the GOP comfortably won the money race. And in the years when Democrats were the underdogs, it wasn’t even close.
Goodbye to all that
A system of public financing would even out the financial playing field that now favors Republicans so decisively. This is no small thing: Over those last three election cycles, the House candidate who spent more money won almost 95 percent of the time. “In a system where big money and the ability to raise big contributions is dominant, those who have access to that big money are going to do better,” says a senior Senate Democratic aide. “And on a really broad scale, that’s Republicans, not Democrats.”
But more than that, public financing would deal a death blow to the machine itself. Of course, lobbying groups will still have ways of exerting influence outside of the campaign-finance system—by, for instance, running fake grassroots campaigns in support of favored causes, as the pharmaceutical industry did in 2003 to help pass the Medicare drug bill. Without campaign contributions, however, the top-down control on which the system depends would quickly unravel. That’s because contributions, unlike other forms of assistance, can legally be coordinated between the donor and the recipient. It was this ability to coordinate that let GOP leaders establish themselves as the funnel for corporate money. Since they then had the power to distribute that money, they could all but compel members to vote with the party. And that, in turn, allowed them to tell K Street: Support us and our agenda completely if you want Congress to support yours. Take away the money, and that two-way discipline vanishes—and with it the machine itself.
Public financing would also help Democrats in a less quantifiable, though perhaps equally important, way. It’s hard to deny that, for all their recent success, Democratic candidates can still sometimes appear vacillating and less sure of their principles than their Republican opponents. One reason why is that the private campaign-finance system not only favors the GOP in real terms, but also forces Democrats to talk out of both sides of their mouths when campaigning. Currently, Democrats—especially the more progressive ones—must ask for votes by claiming they’ll stand up for working people, while at the same time, though more subtly, keeping one eye on the interests of their corporate benefactors. The results, though rarely scandalous, can often be embarrassing, as when Harper’s recently noted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) selling student environmental activists on the virtues of a renewable fuel based on ethanol—the use of which benefits one of the senator’s major contributors, Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland. Because Republicans make less claim to represent the interests of working people, this conflict is far less acute for them. A public-financing program would get Democrats out from under this oppressive system, which forces them to compromise their ideals—or at least creates the impression that they’re doing so.
Finally, public financing will help Democrats politically simply by making it easier for them to pass their agenda. In recent years, the party has at times failed to stay united on major economic votes like the bankruptcy bill of 2005, in part because some members have caved to their corporate backers. If Democrats hope to fix the Medicare drug plan or repeal some of the Bush tax cuts, they’ll need to reduce these defections. Ending the link between corporate money and elections will make it easier for Democrats to side with their constituents, not their contributors. And creating a record of legislative accomplishment is perhaps the most effective way for Democrats to boost their political prospects.
Of course, for the next two years, with President Bush in the White House and Democrats with only the narrowest of majorities in the Senate, there’s no real chance of passing public financing. But Democrats can use this period to define for the press and public what real reform means, and to unite behind it, with an eye to passing legislation after 2008. And in the meantime, firmly planting their flag for reform will bring rewards of its own.
First, getting behind public financing will help inoculate Democrats from the charge that they’re no less corrupt than the GOP. Inevitably, over the next few years, another William Jefferson—the Louisiana Democratic congressman who is being investigated for corruption by the FBI—will emerge. Just as inevitably, Republicans will react by charging that Democrats are no purer than their predecessors—and the media, always afraid of appearing biased, will echo that line. (A San Francisco Chronicle editorial from November offered a preview: “History suggests that a party coming into power by running against a ‘culture of corruption’ will be no less vulnerable to its temptations once the euphoria of the election subsides.”) When this happens, the only truly effective response to these charges of equivalence is for Democrats to assert the need for fundamental reform of the system—reform that Republicans will not support. Doing so would make each Democratic impropriety not an embarrassing deviation from the party’s agenda, but rather, another compelling piece of evidence for it.
By Zachary Roth
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Early this summer, in one of the periodic manifestations of the herd mentality for which this city’s pundit class is known, official Washington decided that corruption didn’t matter. The main piece of evidence for this conclusion was the special election in June to replace Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the California Republican congressman who months earlier had been convicted of bribery. The Democratic candidate had made issues of ethics and influence the focus of her campaign—and wound up losing to a former GOP lobbyist. “The culture of corruption isn’t selling,” declared Slate’s John Dickerson the following day, referring to the Democrats’ label for the Republican scandals of the previous year. Democrats largely accepted the new conventional wisdom, deciding merely to check the box on corruption, rather than making it a focus of their pitch to voters. As the campaign wore on, they invoked the “culture of corruption” less and less frequently. Several Democratic strategists told me before the election that they just didn’t think people cared that much about the issue.
As it turned out, both the pundits and the party were wrong. In official exit polling, more voters named corruption as an extremely important issue than any other, including Iraq. Since then, some pollsters have challenged the way the question was asked on the survey, and expressed doubts that concerns about corruption really did outweigh those about the war. But no experts deny that the issue played a much more crucial part in the Democratic win than almost anyone had expected.
Without really asking for it, then, Democrats have been given a mandate by voters to clean up Washington. Rather than running with it, however, the party is poised once again to check the box on corruption. Democratic leaders have announced that, in their first 100 hours in office, they’ll introduce an ethics- and lobbying-reform package that would ban lobbyist-financed gifts, meals, and travel; mandate disclosure of all member contacts with lobbyists; and address the problem of earmarks by requiring that the sponsors of funding for home-state pet projects be identified, among other steps. These measures are a clear improvement on the toothless approach embraced by congressional Republicans in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal last year. But few seriously believe that they get to the heart of Washington’s influence problem. That problem will exist as long as elected officials must raise large amounts of money to run for office from the organized economic interests they’re supposed to be regulating. That’s why any serious effort to clean up Washington must break the connection between money and elections.
The only way to do that is to provide candidates for office with public revenue to run their campaigns. Such a system of public financing has been the brass ring for reformers for three decades. Versions of public financing have been passed in both Arizona and Maine, where candidates for legislative and statewide offices can receive campaign dollars from the state treasury (see “How Public Financing Works,” page 38). Having been beta-tested, and shown to work effectively, over half a decade at the state level—and now that the issue of money in politics is at the height of its public awareness thanks to the sins of the Republican Congress—this is the perfect time to take the system nationwide.
But despite the efforts of some committed reformers in Congress, neither chamber’s Democratic leadership appears likely to put the issue squarely on the agenda during this session. The office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told me that, though she herself supports public financing, she has not yet decided to make it a “caucus position”—and she has conspicuously failed to sign a public-financing pledge being circulated by good-government groups. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been no more enthusiastic.
This is a crazy decision. Leave aside the fact that, without public financing, you can’t begin to reform Washington’s pay-to-play legislative system. Leave aside the fact that major progressive policy goals—from universal health care to a fairer tax code—probably can’t be achieved without public financing. Leave aside, even, the fact that the current system, which winds up giving outsized political influence to those who can afford to fund campaigns, is a grievous affront to the ideals of the founding fathers. Focus instead on what is, to elected officials, the most important consideration of all: crass political advantage.
By failing to unite behind public financing, Democrats may be blowing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to, as President Bush is wont to say, “change the game” of American politics in their favor. It’s no accident that the rise of conservative power in Washington that began in 1980 and accelerated after 1994 coincided with an exponential increase in the cost of political campaigns. Any system that uses corporate dollars to fund candidates’ bids for office will, almost by definition, advantage the party that hews closest to corporate interests. Over the last 12 years, Republicans have figured out how to exploit that dynamic to build a political machine with which they have dominated their opponents. Now that Democrats are back in power, they have a choice: They can try to adapt to that system by going all out to get their share of the spoils. Or they can destroy it altogether by cutting off the money on which it depends.
Partisans for public financing
Today, many in Washington see public financing as the province of earnest good-government types—the kind of people who live in older northeastern suburbs, and lobby their town council for safer swing-sets. But the issue’s first modern-era champion could hardly have been further from that image. Sen. Russell Long—the son of Huey P. Long, the legendary Louisiana governor who built a machine that dominated state politics in the 1920s and ’30s—was a hard drinker, wily political operator, and close ally of LBJ, who understood how public financing could be used as a political tool. In 1966, concerned about the Republicans’ growing ability to out-raise his party, Long proposed a system that would have provided federal funds for presidential and congressional candidates who agreed to spending limits. His bill passed, but Congress voted the following year to make it inoperative pending further review—thanks in large part to the fears of Sen. Robert Kennedy and his supporters that it would reduce the advantage of candidates with large amounts of private money. A year later, Sen. Kennedy used much of his family’s private fortune to challenge LBJ for the Democratic nomination.
The issue reasserted itself after the Watergate scandal—in which the Nixon White House used anonymous campaign contributions to fund a slew of political dirty tricks, including the break-in at the Watergate building itself. In 1977, majorities in both houses of the Democratic Congress supported a new public-financing proposal, but Senate Republicans filibustered the bill. That set a pattern. Over the ensuing 17 years, various legislative efforts on public financing attracted majority support, only to be filibustered to death by Senate Republicans.
The GOP has consistently opposed public financing over the years, in part out of a stated ideological aversion to all but the most essential forms of non-defense-related public spending. But there’s little doubt that much of the Republican opposition derives from the accurate assessment that the existing private system favors them. In 1988, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—today the Senate GOP leader and the standard bearer for the party’s opposition to all forms of campaign-finance reform—admitted as much: “What this is all about is a struggle for partisan advantage,” he told Jim Lehrer. Democrats, McConnell said, “don’t do as well with…contributors as we do.”
Finally, in 1992, thanks in part to the efforts of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Democrats overcame the filibuster, only to see President George H.W. Bush veto the bill. Movement conservatives always hated the elder Bush, but without this veto, which preserved the private system, they almost certainly could not have come to dominate the political landscape over the next 15 years as completely as they did.
In truth, though, by the early 1990s, many Democrats had grown less enthusiastic about public financing. Over the preceding decade, Rep. Tony Coelho, in his role as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had led an effort to increase the amount of corporate money the party raised. Coelho’s success convinced Democratic House leaders Tom Foley and Dick Gephardt that the system of private financing could be made to work for their party. Many reformers believed that Foley and Gephardt only allowed the 1992 bill to pass because they were confident that it would be vetoed.
Indeed, the following year—with a Democrat in the White House who had pledged his support for reform—Foley did not let public financing out of the House. President Clinton, sensing a tough inter-party battle, chose to spend his limited political capital elsewhere. That proved a crucial turning point: With the system of private financing now unchallenged, Republicans—after taking Congress in 1994—had free rein to build the political machine they would use to dominate Democrats over the next decade.
That machine works as follows: First, Republican leaders pressure major K-Street lobbying shops to hire loyal GOP lieutenants—usually former congressional aides—in place of the pragmatic corporate executives who used to be in charge. That allows the party to subsume K Street’s vast resources—its lawyers, lobbyists, PR professionals, and, most important, its money—into the Republican political operation. Through their allies on K Street, GOP leaders can ensure that lobbying firms give the lion’s share of their donations to Republicans—helping to perpetuate the party’s political dominance. The numbers speak for themselves. In 1993, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, 19 key industries—including accounting, pharmaceuticals, and defense—gave roughly evenly between the parties. By 2003, they gave twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats.
A closer look at the numbers makes the GOP’s money advantage—particularly after 2000 when it had also captured the White House—even clearer. In the 2002 cycle, Republicans out-raised Democrats by over one third, according to figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, and which include contributions to individual candidates, to the parties themselves, and to their various committees. In 2004, Republicans out-raised Democrats by almost one quarter. And in 2006, when Democrats appeared likely to retake Congress, Republicans still had an advantage of almost 14 percent. In other words, even in a year when Democrats were favored, the GOP comfortably won the money race. And in the years when Democrats were the underdogs, it wasn’t even close.
Goodbye to all that
A system of public financing would even out the financial playing field that now favors Republicans so decisively. This is no small thing: Over those last three election cycles, the House candidate who spent more money won almost 95 percent of the time. “In a system where big money and the ability to raise big contributions is dominant, those who have access to that big money are going to do better,” says a senior Senate Democratic aide. “And on a really broad scale, that’s Republicans, not Democrats.”
But more than that, public financing would deal a death blow to the machine itself. Of course, lobbying groups will still have ways of exerting influence outside of the campaign-finance system—by, for instance, running fake grassroots campaigns in support of favored causes, as the pharmaceutical industry did in 2003 to help pass the Medicare drug bill. Without campaign contributions, however, the top-down control on which the system depends would quickly unravel. That’s because contributions, unlike other forms of assistance, can legally be coordinated between the donor and the recipient. It was this ability to coordinate that let GOP leaders establish themselves as the funnel for corporate money. Since they then had the power to distribute that money, they could all but compel members to vote with the party. And that, in turn, allowed them to tell K Street: Support us and our agenda completely if you want Congress to support yours. Take away the money, and that two-way discipline vanishes—and with it the machine itself.
Public financing would also help Democrats in a less quantifiable, though perhaps equally important, way. It’s hard to deny that, for all their recent success, Democratic candidates can still sometimes appear vacillating and less sure of their principles than their Republican opponents. One reason why is that the private campaign-finance system not only favors the GOP in real terms, but also forces Democrats to talk out of both sides of their mouths when campaigning. Currently, Democrats—especially the more progressive ones—must ask for votes by claiming they’ll stand up for working people, while at the same time, though more subtly, keeping one eye on the interests of their corporate benefactors. The results, though rarely scandalous, can often be embarrassing, as when Harper’s recently noted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) selling student environmental activists on the virtues of a renewable fuel based on ethanol—the use of which benefits one of the senator’s major contributors, Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland. Because Republicans make less claim to represent the interests of working people, this conflict is far less acute for them. A public-financing program would get Democrats out from under this oppressive system, which forces them to compromise their ideals—or at least creates the impression that they’re doing so.
Finally, public financing will help Democrats politically simply by making it easier for them to pass their agenda. In recent years, the party has at times failed to stay united on major economic votes like the bankruptcy bill of 2005, in part because some members have caved to their corporate backers. If Democrats hope to fix the Medicare drug plan or repeal some of the Bush tax cuts, they’ll need to reduce these defections. Ending the link between corporate money and elections will make it easier for Democrats to side with their constituents, not their contributors. And creating a record of legislative accomplishment is perhaps the most effective way for Democrats to boost their political prospects.
Of course, for the next two years, with President Bush in the White House and Democrats with only the narrowest of majorities in the Senate, there’s no real chance of passing public financing. But Democrats can use this period to define for the press and public what real reform means, and to unite behind it, with an eye to passing legislation after 2008. And in the meantime, firmly planting their flag for reform will bring rewards of its own.
First, getting behind public financing will help inoculate Democrats from the charge that they’re no less corrupt than the GOP. Inevitably, over the next few years, another William Jefferson—the Louisiana Democratic congressman who is being investigated for corruption by the FBI—will emerge. Just as inevitably, Republicans will react by charging that Democrats are no purer than their predecessors—and the media, always afraid of appearing biased, will echo that line. (A San Francisco Chronicle editorial from November offered a preview: “History suggests that a party coming into power by running against a ‘culture of corruption’ will be no less vulnerable to its temptations once the euphoria of the election subsides.”) When this happens, the only truly effective response to these charges of equivalence is for Democrats to assert the need for fundamental reform of the system—reform that Republicans will not support. Doing so would make each Democratic impropriety not an embarrassing deviation from the party’s agenda, but rather, another compelling piece of evidence for it.